Jared Diamond and Charles Mann to Discuss Their New Books at AAG Annual Meeting

March 12, 2013

Diamond

Jared Diamond and Charles Mann will speak on their most recent books in a special session at the AAG Annual Meeting in Los Angeles at 6:45 p.m. on Wednesday, April 10, 2013. This session is hosted by the AAG and its new publication, The AAG Review of Books.

In his latest book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?, Jared Diamond examines how traditional societies have lived, and asks if their different approaches to living can inform the Western world today.

Mann

Charles Mann provided a new understanding of life in the Americas before Columbus arrived in his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. In his new book, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, Mann follows up on the post-Colombian Americas and shows how European settlements there shaped the world through a network of ecological and economic exchange.

Over the past two decades, these two writers have reached out to put cultural and historical geography’s perennial questions and current salience before a mass readership and media public. In addition to discussing their most recent books, Diamond and Mann will also address the challenges and rewards of weaving multiple strands of disparate findings and data from geography’s historical and human-environmental sectors to produce “big picture” projections while at the same time presenting a fascinating array of specific cases.

Their interests intersect in multiple ways, but as their recent work demonstrates, they have been signally effective in focusing attention on the nature of indigenous and traditional societies and their confrontations and accommodations with a modernizing world over the past five or so centuries.

Both authors will be available to answer audience questions and sign books following their presentations.